To the Editor:
I want to thank my good friend Scott Sillars for his clear and forthright description of the background to and the circumstances of the Princeton Council’s decision to adopt a PILOT agreement with the developers of the Stockton Street project [Mailbox, October 29].
I draw two lessons from it.
First, the decision is manifestly a subsidy to the richest among us and not to the poorest. Without the PILOT, we learn, “the project would only have an internal rate of return of 5.9 percent, which is not commercially viable.” What rate currently is “commercially viable”? Seven, 10, 12 percent? I don’t know. But the difference between it and 5.9 percent (multiplied by the applicable principal) is the amount of the subsidy. It isn’t going to those without other options.
Second, clearly, the system we use to assure an adequate stock of affordable housing is broken, just like our healthcare system and, I fear, our food system. Housing, like health and food, is not a luxury. It is not even a utility. It is a necessity. Why do we persist in only making these necessities available at “commercially viable” rates of return? Why are we not pursuing socially viable rates of provision?
Of course, supplying necessities at a loss is not sustainable. But if a 3 percent return is good enough for the U.S. Treasury, 6 percent ought to be enough to raise the money required to ensure affordable housing, not only in Princeton but everywhere. I haven’t seen clearer proof recently of why we need truly public banking: precisely to finance actually-affordable housing, build state-of-the-art healthcare and educational facilities near the people who need them most, and provide flexible, low-interest bridge loans to small businesses and farmers.
As we currently lack such options, I am disappointed that the financial wizards in Princeton can’t figure out how to raise the money for housing developments that aren’t subsidies for the rich. I am disappointed that the creative faculty and students at the University’s School of Architecture aren’t enlisted to design affordable, and surely award-winning housing for all the town’s buildable sites. And I am disappointed that the leaders of the Princeton Theological Seminary, on whose land much of the Stockton Street project is to be built, forgot to lash themselves to the mast of their social gospel and appear instead to have been bedeviled by the siren calls of commerce.